Swapping "home"

The last few days life has been quiet and lazy on campus because the students aren't back yet. I've been curled up inside my cozy apartment, unwilling to venture out into the dreary cold, especially since the only cafeteria that has been open is a twenty minute walk away. My phone has been virtually silent for days. But today things came back to life! I received a text from a returning student: "Dear Sarah, can I come over and take a shower at your place? There is no hot water in our entire dormitory." Yes, yes! No self-respecting girl should be forced to forgo a shower. Then another text from her roommate, "Can I come too? And shower?" Once they arrived, I heard that another classmate had arrived three days earlier to a dark, cold dorm room with no electricity or drinking water, and no hot water in the shower room. She was still waiting for her shower! (I told them to tell her to high-tail it over here.) Each time a girl showed up, she brought "special food" from her hometown as a gift for me. Peanuts coated in sweetener and fried, dried tofu in a package, dried pork, various beautifully boxed crackers, and large, thin, crispy disks of  baked flatbread sprinkled with sesame seeds. This "bringing back food from my hometown" is a Chinese tradition which ensures that classmates, roommates, and other friends get a taste of snacks and delicacies from all over the country. Tasting food from a friend's home invites you to share in a small part of his inner, familiar experience. Moreover, giving food to someone or eating food with someone is an integral part of building and maintaining relationships here. You don't carry mom's home fried sugar-coated peanuts or grandma's hand-wrapped zhongzi on a 12 hour train ride to give to a cursory acquaintance. You bring it for your friends. Come to think of it, I don't usually want some out-of-the-circle acquaintance using my shower. But me and my girls felt gladness in swapping out "a little bit of home" today. I guess that's a two-culture meter that reads "friends".  Privileged to love and be loved in a faraway place.

Food from three provinces!

Oh, yeah. Just remembered. When I was a little girl wearing handmade aprons over my dresses, living at various times in a bus, a travel trailer, and a formerly abandoned house with no hot water, I used a lot of other people's showers. Thanks, y'all, for caring enough to share "home" like that.